Is WoodRocket the Future of Online Porn?

The front page of WoodRocket.com offers visitors an interesting mix of content. There’s James Deen, professing his love of food, assembling the world’s most expensive burrito. Then a bevy of buxom beauties attempt to fit various household objects—a cell phone, the handle of a plunger, a baseball bat—down their throats, answering the age-old question “Will it fit?” And, of course, it’s impossible to ignore Anthony Rosano as SpongeKnob SquareNuts deep under the sea and getting sucked off by Skin Diamond.

Is it a porn site? Is it a comedy site? It’s a little of both actually—and the team behind WoodRocket.com is hoping that it’s about to redefine adult entertainment as we know it.

There’s no denying that the past decade has seen a tremendous shift in the way porn is produced, sold and consumed. An industry that exploded with the rise of VCRs and VHS quickly made the shift to DVD and Web-based content only to see piracy-driven tube sites eat away at the profits of numerous hardworking pornographers. Some naysayers believe that this is the beginning of the end of the porn industry. But there are at least a few optimistic souls who believe it’s actually just the beginning of an exciting new era of porn.

Lee Roy Myers is an award-winning director best known for his hardcore parodies of everything from The Simpsons to True Blood  and Sailor Moon. With WoodRocket he’s aiming to move beyond XXX spoofs into a whole new frontier. Ever imagined a site that mixes adult content with mainstream entertainment, giving both porn lovers and comedy lovers the videos they crave—without charging them a single cent? Myers has.

“We wanted to create a website that was completely different than anything else out there,” he explains. “Most people go [to porn sites] to find something they want to get off to, do their thing, then leave the page. [On] mainstream comedy sites, people stay for a while to be entertained, until they get an urge to check out some porn, and then leave. We wanted to create a site that has both offerings. We wanted to redefine the term adult entertainment. Mainstream movies and television have gotten sexier. And people love shows like Game of Thrones, Girls, Spartacus because of how hot they are, not despite how hot they are. So with WoodRocket we want to go that step further.”

So far the formula seems to be working. Just a few months into launch, WoodRocket has received a great deal of attention: Mainstream news outlets like Vice, Gawker and even Bon Appetit have taken notice of the site’s various offerings, profiling everything from the sensational SpongeKnob SquareNuts to the site’s less hardcore offerings, like porn performers re-creating various popular memes and the WoodRocket exclusive series James Deen Loves Food. Most of the site’s videos have several thousand views, with viral sensations like SpongeKnob nearing almost a million.

But traffic isn’t the whole story. For WoodRocket to truly change the way the porn industry operates, it’ll have to figure out a way to turn a profit while giving away content for free. That task is never an easy one, and it’s made markedly harder by the fact that, unlike most free porn sites, WoodRocket isn’t relying on user-uploaded content. Everything it features is either produced in-house or legally licensed. But, once again, the WoodRocket team has some innovative ideas about how to make free content a profitable enterprise.

First and foremost, like most free sites, WoodRocket makes a bit of money off of advertising; it also has a store that stocks popular adult products (many of which can be seen in the site’s videos, which provide convenient links back to the product page). But those aren’t the only ways that WoodRocket is planning to pay the bills. Taking a page out of mainstream entertainment’s playbook, the site peppers its videos with product placement. But instead of Coke and Snapple, the brands you’ll be seeing are more along the lines of Evolved Novelties and Zero Tolerance Toys.

Perhaps most interestingly, WoodRocket is hoping to follow in the footsteps of Kickstarter, using crowdfunding to finance some of its more audacious projects.

Fans craving, say, a XXX parody of Game of Thrones will have the opportunity to put their money where their groins are. The more generous ones will be rewarded with gifts like autographed props and scripts—or even a producer credit and a trip to the video’s set.

DVDs and pay porn sites may soon go the way of the dinosaurs, but there’s no denying that hardcore is more popular than ever. WoodRocket’s ideas are definitely different from the standard porn-site model, but as free—and often pirated—content continues to shake up the system, it may be riding the wave of the future. After all, in a world where porn stars like Sasha Grey and James Deen have secured starring roles in movies by lauded mainstream directors, where someone like Kim Kardashian can launch a massive multimedia empire by releasing a sex tape, is WoodRocket’s mission to exist on the border of porn and mainstream really all that strange?